EARTHKEEPING
NEWS
A NEWSLETTER
OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY
Reader Reply
27 April, 2006
A Reader Writes:
An Open Letter To Whom It May Concern
A recent bimonthly newsletter of the North American Coalition for Christianity and Ecology (Jan/Feb 2006) contained a short announcement entitled, “Over 10,000 Clergy Sign Open Letter on Science and Religion.” The subtitle identifies the open letter as having been “initiated by Michael Zimmermann, Professor of Biology at the University of Wisconsin, and supported by Zygon Center for Religion and Science, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.”
On the face of it, Dr. Zimmermann appears to have drafted a theologically “nice” declaration that sounds innocuous enough to have duped mainstream liberal clergy into signing it — clergy who have followed the dominant secular culture in abandoning “natural theology” and driving an epistemological wedge between “matters of fact” (or science) and “matters of faith” (or myth).
However, anyone astute enough to “read between the lines” who is the least bit aware of the current debate over biogenesis between neo-Darwinists and Intelligent Design advocates should readily see how inaccurate Zimmermann’s letter is and how surreptitiously he has glossed over controversial issues.
Here I wish to critique Zimmermann’s open letter by quoting its five main paragraphs, interspersed by my own comments.
[1] “Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook.”
The first thing that hits the reader is the Clerical admission that believers disagree about interpreting the scriptures. Yet, as we shall see, nowhere in the letter is there the slightest hint that scientists disagree about how to interpret the biological, genetic, paleontological, or geological data. Rather, the letter tacitly assumes (and therefore suggests to the uninformed reader) that, unlike the religious domain, all modern scientists unanimously agree on the “truth” of evolution. Such is not the case. Furthermore, in most disputes regarding credibility, neoDarwinists beg the question by defining as authoritative only those scientists who agree with their position.
Secondly, as we shall see, nowhere does the letter make any distinction between microevolution with its proposed mechanisms of development, and macroevolution as a theory of the origins of species or of life itself. Hence, the letter fails to admit the possibility that educated religious believers might accept the former but reject the latter. In fact, ID advocates accept microevolutionary change within a given gene pool, but reject macroevolution, construed as the emergence of all organic life and phylogenic diversity (speciation) by universal common descent without purpose or direction. The macroevolutionary story is speculative or quasi “religious” in the sense that most biologists believe it dogmatically even in the absence of confirming evidence. (footnote 1)
Thirdly, the familiar admission that Christians “take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice” but “do not read the Bible literally” suggests that the Bible as a whole can (or should) never be taken as an accurate account of real, historical events. Of course, this view of Biblical or extraBiblical literature is simply false. It also suggests a false dichotomy between literalness and nonliteralness. The Bible is not a single book about which we have only one of two options, either to take it literally, or to take it nonliterally. It is a collection of books containing both symbolic passages and factual accounts or historical narratives. The challenge in reading it is to determine which passages should be understood symbolically and which passages should be understood literally.
[2] “Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible — the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark — convey timeless truths about God, human beings and the proper relationship between Creator and creation, expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.”
One’s first response to this might be to think, “How sweet; Zimmermann is affirming “spiritual truths.” But again, the implied false dichotomy is that “timeless truths” cannot coexist with factual history in the same literary work. Even if its purpose is “to transform hearts,” that does not preclude it from doing so through the vehicle of an historically accurate narrative.
The reference to “beloved stories” (Creation, Noah’s ark) that “convey timeless truths” is perhaps a subtle effort to relegate Biblical narratives to the realm of mere mythology. But the last two sentences are anything but subtle: “Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.” But if the question at issue is “How did life get here in the first place?”, then the truth of the answer cannot be decided by criteria that are radically incommensurate. Given the same factual question of origins, to suggest that ‘true’ in a religious context can mean something entirely different from ‘true’ in a scientific context is epistemological nonsense. The truth or falsity of a factual assertion is not determined by the purpose for which it was uttered. To suggest that a narrative (such as the creation story) is non-factual because its purpose is to transform hearts simply begs the question at issue, namely, whether the story really is factual. Moreover, if the Genesis account of creation really were factual, then it could not possibly “comfortably coexist” (harmonize) with the macroevolutionary account of spontaneous generation, as paragraph three suggests.
[3] “We, the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rest. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”
Of course, we agree that “the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist.” But the problem is that “evolution” (understood as macroevolution, the purposeless emergence of all life forms and species from inorganic matter) has not been discovered by modern science, nor does there appear to be a feasible genetic mechanism for such an improbability. Hence, evolution has not earned the epistemic status of being dubbed “a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny.” If by “foundational” the writer means “an unquestionable premise,” then he is begging the question as to its truth or incorrigibility. If “has stood up to rigorous scrutiny” means “has encountered no opposition within the ranks of qualified biologists,” then the claim is patently false. In fact, there are good scientific critiques of macroevolution in the professional literature, of which the public, if not the clergy, is largely ignorant; and such critiques do not depend upon reading the Bible at all, let alone reading it as “a scientific textbook.”
Moreover, even if there were complete unanimity within the scientific community, the truth of any theory is not determined by a majority vote. Scientists are supposed to believe theory X because it is true; theory X is not true because someone — or everyone — believes it! A majority’s believing X does not make it true.
The letter claims that to reject evolution or treat it as one theory among others is to embrace ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. This claim is either absurd, or must be taken metaphorically. To reject a theory because you believe it is false or lacks good evidentiary warrant is not to embrace or to transmit anything! (If ignorance is the absence of knowledge, you cannot embrace or transmit that which is absent.) Since the metaphysical (“religious” or speculative) aspects of the evolutionary story lack empirical confirmation, the greatest disservice we could do to our children — or to our public school classrooms — is not to expose them to valid critiques of a theory that is even more scientifically tenuous today than it was when Darwin introduced it in 1859.
[4] “We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris.”
There is nothing wrong in principle with the above paragraph. However, seen in conjunction with the previous paragraph [3], the writer is clearly implying that the neoDarwinian naturalists have employed “critical thought” and gotten it right, whereas the religious creationists have abandoned critical thought and gotten it wrong. ID scholars would vehemently disagree with this assessment on the grounds that the neoDarwinian “priesthood” has not only ostracized dissenting opinions from peer-reviewed academic journals, but also censured scientific critiques of their own paradigm in public education generally. The ACLU has erroneously framed this issue in terms of the ‘non-establishment’ clause in the Constitution, rather than as an issue of academic freedom. But across America, the freedom of scientists, teachers and students to question Darwin’s theory has come under increasing attack by what can only be called neoDarwinian fundamentalists. Examples of their academic intolerance are numerous. (footnote 2)
The Zimmermann letter closes with this:
[5] “We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.”
The writers apparently confuse knowledge with belief. One does not know the truth of a theory (or it would no longer be called a theory, which by definition is not yet confirmed or verified, or perhaps is neither verifiable nor falsifiable); rather, one believes a theory to be true in virtue of supporting evidence or reasons. If we are not justified in believing evolution to be true for lack of supporting evidence, then we ought not to call it “a core component of human knowledge.”
Here again we have a reference to two categorically different “forms” or “orders” of truth. At best, this is just sloppy semantics by the writer(s) of this letter. Science and religion may indeed have different kinds of assertions and methodologies for testing their claims, but from that it does not follow that each domain is immune to criticism by the other. For there are undoubtedly some assertions that both science and religion would make that are testable by common criteria. (E.g., Textual Criticism would be a case in point, as well as the claim that life, order, complexity, and consciousness can emerge “on its own” without the teleological cause of mind and intelligence.) Furthermore, what each domain means by the predicate ‘true’ does not differ; so their epistemic languages are not totally incommensurable.
At worst, this reference to different “forms” of truth is a post-Wittgensteinian effort to consign the claims of neoDarwinian naturalism to the scientific “language game” (or the domain of fact), and the claims of religious creationism to a different “language game” (or the domain of myth), and to suggest that they share no common rationality. The “comfortable coexistence” to which paragraph [3] alludes will (according to Zimmermann) obtain only if “religious truths” remain in their corner and the alleged “discoveries of modern science” remain in their corner — and never the twain shall meet. This is a move not toward harmonization of religion and science, but a separation between them — an epistemological separation (or “wedge”) that bars the former from criticizing the latter.
One of the most regrettable oversights that occurs in popular media coverage of the school curricula debates is the failure to clearly identify — or the failure to honestly acknowledge — where the scientific data ends and where the theoretical speculation or mythology begins (that is, the quasi “religious” aspect of Evolutionism). It is imperative to distinguish microevolutionary change (some of which can be brought about by ‘natural selection’ operating on populations or gene pools) from macroevolutionism (or ‘Evolutionism’ with a capital ‘E’), which Phillip Johnson called “the grand Metaphysical Story of science” — the latter being an explanatory theory (hypothesis) of biological origins that goes beyond the available evidence. As such, Evolutionism constitutes a doctrine or belief system — not a confirmed “truth.” When most biologists refer to ‘evolution’, they mean Evolutionism in this latter, broader sense. However, in some popular defenses of evolutionism (or attacks on creationism), the advocates will “flip flop” back and forth between the two senses of ‘evolution’ by citing examples of microevolution as a warrant or justification for believing in macroevolution (as in the case of beak size oscillation among Darwin’s finches). This is blatantly equivocal and conflates two different claims.
What also fails to get mentioned in popular media is that this broader construal presupposes a naturalistic metaphysics — that is, an ontology (or view of what there is) that is essentially physicalistic or materialistic. I say “essentially” because naturalism, physicalism, and materialism are not strictly identical, but for all practical purposes, they are equivalent insofar as they do not allow for the possibility of any object or forces in the universe that might be called ‘supernatural’ or ‘vitalistic’ or any ‘final causes’ that are ultimately ‘teleological.’ Only ‘efficient causation’ is recognized.
Now if Evolutionism presupposes ‘scientific naturalism’, then by definition it cannot admit the notion of God or a Creator in the emergence of biological life — a belief that is essential to Judeo-Christian theism. Therefore, it should become obvious why simply adding the adjective ‘theistic’ in front of ‘evolutionism’ cannot achieve the desired reconciliation between the two worldviews. Since ‘evolutionism’ believes life came about by a purposeless, undirected process and theism believes just the opposite, one cannot simply propose ‘theistic evolutionism’ as an alternate view without either (1) creating an oxymoron, or (2) equivocating on the term ‘evolutionism.’ If ‘evolution’ came about by divine agency, then ‘evolution’ in the phrase ‘theistic evolution’ cannot mean the same thing as it does to a scientific naturalist; it represents a radically different theory — not a genuine synthesis. Hence, the equivocation is misleading; and we could only eliminate the equivocation and prevent the confusion by labeling the two theories with appropriate subscripts, such as EvolutionismN and EvolutionismT. I am not suggesting that no version of ‘theistic evolution’ could be tenable — just that ‘evolution’ in the context of a design hypothesis would mean something very different from what it means in the context of Darwinian naturalism. (footnote 3) Indeed, it calls for nothing less than a paradigm shift in biology. If proponents of ‘intelligent design’ are to be respectfully included in the dialogue on biological history, neoDarwinists will have to give up their dogmatism, admit their ignorance of certain events in nature (or the inadequacy of their explanations for those events), and abandon what Michael Behe calls “scientific chauvinism.”
In light of the foregoing flaws, misrepresentations and oversights, it seems that the clergy who signed Zimmermann’s open letter failed to fully employ the gift of “critical thought” or the “God-given faculty of reason” the letter so eloquently praises. Their willingness to “sell out” to an unsubstantiated biological paradigm that is founded on a naturalistic/materialistic ontology is nothing less than regrettable.
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